Interview with David Benini, Director, Product Marketing, Aware, Inc.

Company referenced in this item: Aware Inc

FB
You have a host of biometric software products ranging from FastCapture with LiveScan API to your PIVSuite for FIPS 201 applications. Would you please review your product range for our readers?

Aware
Aware provides off-the-shelf biometrics software, including client-based software development kits, and a service-oriented application server, our Biometric Services Platform (BioSP). The products perform a wide range of advanced image and data processing on both the client and the server, including face and fingerprint autocapture, hardware abstraction, biometric matching, data formatting, quality control, and credential personalization and reading. BioSP is used in systems to establish secure connectivity to enrolment clients and back-end systems such as AFIS, and also perform the advanced biometric functions mentioned above centrally, via web services. It offers several other advanced capabilities such as programmable workflow, user administration, and quality reporting. It’s truly an off-the-shelf product that’s grown into a powerful platform, and has benefitted from lessons learned through several large-scale deployments.

FB
I note that your software solutions are designed for system integrators, government agencies, and hardware providers; so I am wondering, where are you seeing the greatest growth of this segment, and also, in which vertical markets are you starting to see some growth?

Aware
Yes, our sales are most often through system integrators and occasionally directly to the federal agencies with internal development capabilities. We also serve as an OEM to product providers who bundle our software with their hardware devices or software solutions.

We continue to see gradual but steady growth in the public sector not only in the United States but also abroad in Europe, and perhaps just a bit more slowly in Asia and South America. We are also starting to see some growth outside the public sector, in the medical arena. Since there is legislation that requires that healthcare providers secure their data, they are finding that using biometrics is a useful tool to secure access to private data. Biometrics also offer convenience that is valued in a healthcare environment.

FB
Yes indeed, I couldn’t agree more regarding the healthcare market; we were recently on a conference call, arranged by the IBIA, with Dr. Halamka, who is the Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)/Co-Chair of the HIT Standards Committee, and he is also working in that area; he is a very strong supporter for that particular segment, such as you describe; so yes, it’s a tremendous growth area.

When we last spoke with one another, you mentioned that the industry needs to continue to work on interoperability between different components. Has this situation improved at all, or is this an area that still requires additional work?

Aware
It feels as though it’s improved somewhat. One area that I find particularly encouraging is that NIST did such a good job authoring the PIV standards that I expect they will be used outside the US public sector; they essentially defined an entire biometric smart card ecosystem that can be utilized for many applications. The list of products approved by the GSA for use in PIV systems continues to grow, which I think demonstrates the support of the industry for compliant, interoperable solutions. This is something that we just spoke about at a conference in India; how PIV standards can be quite useful outside the US.

FB
In terms of growth in the biometric industry, where do you see the industry on the whole, in terms of its growth potential, currently?

Aware
I would characterize the market, generally, as having matured to the point where people can trust the functionality of biometric solutions. I mean this in the sense that people are getting what they were told that they would get. Biometric solutions, overall, have become more reliable, and are meeting expectations in an increasingly varied set of use cases. I believe that is feeding growth beyond the early adopter-minded customers who, for whatever reason, had the luxury of being able to experiment somewhat with technologies that were perhaps still being vetted to some degree. The technology has matured on many levels and demonstrated its capabilities to the point that it can be used reliably, even in large-scale, high-volume, complex systems.

FB
I find that very interesting because your comments echo, almost identically, what we had heard, and again I refer to Dr. Halamka, where his comment was very similar to yours in that, for the first time now, he is a strong supporter of biometrics because the industry is now delivering on the promises that they said they would, that the technology is very solid, very secure, and it is now time to start to implement it. So, it is very similar to what you were feeling about the industry; however, as you also stated, in terms of absolute growth, it is still in the early stages because this is just beginning to happen now.

Aware
Yes, I think that with many industries at this stage, people tend to forecast a “hockey stick of growth” early on, but I don’t anticipate that in the biometrics arena. That said, biometrics are not a passing fad; this is a technology that is going to be with us for a long time. It is not a technology that is going to be replaced by something completely new, such as you might see in areas where there is a steep adoption curve and then replacement by something smaller or faster. Growth in biometrics will be more gradual and importantly also more permanent.

However, I do see some areas where growth is picking up particularly quickly, and that is with the adoption of the tenprint [that’s capture of ten fingerprints very quickly with two slaps and a double-thumb image]. We can now capture high-quality tenprints quickly and reliably in just a few seconds, and all that data is so useful in one-to-many matching applications like identification and duplicate checking. So I can envision a steady increase in the number of applications for which tenprint capture is applicable.

I’ve also seen some impressive improvements in iris capture from a distance, which is a modality I expect we are going to see continued growth; it is truly remarkable technology, and the things that we can do once we can capture such high-quality biometrics quickly from a distance will unquestionably find important applications.

FB
What can we expect to see from Aware, Inc., in the coming year?

Aware
You’ll be seeing some announcements on the deployments of our BioSP server platform, and you will continue to see us demonstrate and deploy solutions for mobile biometric capture, another area of high growth where we have expertise and products.  www.aware.com/biometrics

FB
David, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us.